England’s Glory
Don’t ask me to
Puff out my chest
And wave the union flag
To paint my face
With red and white
To swell with pride
At monstrous words
In mawkish Hope and Glory
What then, forget Iraq?
Or strutting Blair o’erweening
Or all the way to colonies
To slaving ships
And white god, tinkling teacups
Genteel lawns and vicars
Iron fist revealed concealed
In velvet bloody gauntlet?
Patriotic Daily Mail
I spit on you
Despising
The most I’ll manage
If we must
Delight, albeit tempered
Disbelieving
When national team
Our boys in white
Fail to lose at cricket
But when we stamped
Across the globe
In name of God and monarch
One legacy we left behind
Our English tongue transplanted
And root it took
And shoot and branch
In tropic soil it ran amok
Interbreeding native stock
In hybrid glorious
Bastard forms
And though the French will try – in vain-
You can’t contain a language
Or water in a sieve
Convolvulus is obstinate
Its tendrils creep unseen
To thrive, survive and overrule
The wasteland’s Morning Glory
So glad I am
For native tongue
The accident of English
For euphony and harmony
For synonyms and antonyms
For accent dialect and burr
The richness, wealth and vigour
For false friends, puns
And slang and street
For imports exports world wide
Web communication
Poems, for specialist and general
For Queen’s, RP
And rapper’s binge
For daily neologism
Writ in letters, signed on hand
Cryptic in a crossword
Formed in the infant mouth
A mammana a boppata
We all adopt his terms
(And grieve for them, outgrown)
Fashion fad or ancient
Word, beloved of generations
Esoteric vocab
Exclusive to the few
Dog’s bollocks to the printer
Cat’s whiskers or pyjamas
Where does the bee locate his knees?
Or mother’s clapping hammer
A hundred phrases, idioms
A cornucopia and feast
Excessive manic splurge
So I will hymn
Eschewing pride
The language of my birth
The plethora and surplus
The joyous surfeit, glut
Extravagance exuberant
Mine by chance
Geography
Imbibed with mother’s milk
Democratic free for all
Beloved English tongue
Don’t ask me to
Puff out my chest
And wave the union flag
To paint my face
With red and white
To swell with pride
At monstrous words
In mawkish Hope and Glory
What then, forget Iraq?
Or strutting Blair o’erweening
Or all the way to colonies
To slaving ships
And white god, tinkling teacups
Genteel lawns and vicars
Iron fist revealed concealed
In velvet bloody gauntlet?
Patriotic Daily Mail
I spit on you
Despising
The most I’ll manage
If we must
Delight, albeit tempered
Disbelieving
When national team
Our boys in white
Fail to lose at cricket
But when we stamped
Across the globe
In name of God and monarch
One legacy we left behind
Our English tongue transplanted
And root it took
And shoot and branch
In tropic soil it ran amok
Interbreeding native stock
In hybrid glorious
Bastard forms
And though the French will try – in vain-
You can’t contain a language
Or water in a sieve
Convolvulus is obstinate
Its tendrils creep unseen
To thrive, survive and overrule
The wasteland’s Morning Glory
So glad I am
For native tongue
The accident of English
For euphony and harmony
For synonyms and antonyms
For accent dialect and burr
The richness, wealth and vigour
For false friends, puns
And slang and street
For imports exports world wide
Web communication
Poems, for specialist and general
For Queen’s, RP
And rapper’s binge
For daily neologism
Writ in letters, signed on hand
Cryptic in a crossword
Formed in the infant mouth
A mammana a boppata
We all adopt his terms
(And grieve for them, outgrown)
Fashion fad or ancient
Word, beloved of generations
Esoteric vocab
Exclusive to the few
Dog’s bollocks to the printer
Cat’s whiskers or pyjamas
Where does the bee locate his knees?
Or mother’s clapping hammer
A hundred phrases, idioms
A cornucopia and feast
Excessive manic splurge
So I will hymn
Eschewing pride
The language of my birth
The plethora and surplus
The joyous surfeit, glut
Extravagance exuberant
Mine by chance
Geography
Imbibed with mother’s milk
Democratic free for all
Beloved English tongue
22nd November 2009, autoroute to Narbonne
I love this poem, though it is my own! It came to me in a rush as some of my poems do, and demanded to be set down quickly, so much so that I had to jot notes before the lines disappeared because I wasn't able to begin to write it properly till I got to the motorway ( or I would have made myself sick!) It expresses something I feel strongly about, words/ language, I suppose. Plus I also feel negatively but equally atrongly about patriotism.
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